I was particularly mesmerized by Kerry Tribe’s film installation about “H.M.”, an epileptic who underwent experimental brain surgery in the 50’s. The removal of several parts of his brain left him with a terrible sort of amnesia that limited his memory to events 20 seconds prior.

To evoke H.M.’s condition, this two-channel film installation uses a single strand of film threaded through two adjacent projectors with an interval of twenty seconds between them. The observation of the tandem projections brings awareness to the ephemeral nature of that brief interval, and by extension, the fragile nature of human perception.

02/24/2010

The 8-course “farmer’s feast” started with a glass of bubbly (“from chef Barber, for your anniversary”) and lasted four and a half hours. Epic. Decadent. Exhausting. Amazing.

Bonus fun: on Sunday morning, we went back to Stone Barns to visit its Center for Food and Agriculture. Said hello to the happy pigs, chickens, sheep and geese.

My advice when you go: stay overnight and drive back to the city the next day real slow. Stone Barns is less than 45 minutes by car and you want to stretch out that feeling of being away for as long as possible.

02/03/2010

Several random things:

Peep Show. It’s cold out there. Just hunker down and start with Season 1, episode 1. And I’ll see you in a couple months.

*

Andre Agassi’s Open. On Kindle for iPhone it surpassed 8000 pages! Well, 8000 very tiny pages. But now I’m addicted to reading on my iPhone, loving the Kindle and Instapaper apps. Also addicted to watching old Agassi matches on youtube. And this:

Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.

02/04/2009

I was excited to read that Doug Dubois is coming out with a book this June, All the Days and Nights (via Aperture’s blog). I’ll be the first in line for it. The book will showcase photographs from his Family Photos series, which I’ve long admired.

Here’s an excellent conversation with Doug Dubois and Alec Soth on Conscientious from October 2007. Worth reading if you haven’t already. I second what Alec said about the 1991 MoMA exhibition Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort. It was also influential for me, though in catalogue form some years later. I’m shocked you can still buy a copy of it online, I would have thought it was unavailable ages ago!

Doug was kind enough to let me post some of his photographs here. We should start a fan club!